KGB Reveals Andropov Ordered Hitler’s Body Destroyed

In a story broken by Interfax, Gen. Vasily Khristoforov, the head archivist of the Federal Security Service (the successor of the KGB,) has revealed that the bodies of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun and those of the Goebbels family were burned, ground to dust, and thrown in an East German river in 1970 on orders of KGB chief and later Soviet Premier Andropov.

According to recently declassified Soviet documents, the Soviet Army discovered the bodies of Hitler and Braun in a shell crater outside the Reichstag Bunker, where the Germans had burned them. After forensic examination, the bodies were secretly buried in a forest near Rathenau, Germany in June 1945. The next year, the remains were exhumed and buried in a secret location on a Soviet Army base in Magdeburg, East Germany.

As long as the remains were on property of the Soviet Army, their existence could be hidden. But when the decision was made in 1970 to turn the Army base over to the East German government, Soviet leadership feared the possibility of the remains being discovered and becoming a shrine to Hitler. Therefore, the bodies of Hitler, Braun and the Goebbels family were exhumed by a special KGB contingent, burned in a large bonfire, ground to dust and dumped in the Biederitz River.

Gen. Khristoforov told Interfax that the only physical remains of the Nazi Fuhrer are a piece of jawbone and a skull fragment that are in FSB archives. He dismissed the claims of two US scientists questioning the authenticity of the remains, noting that they did not receive any DNA samples from the remains, and in any event “even if you take the fragments kept in our custody, it is unclear what these data can be compared with.”